For the Love of a Rescue Dog

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Oh, Hai!

I’m Rosa. My together-forever partner Laulo and I live in Detroit, on a street that long ago earned the nickname Murder Row.

That was a long time ago. It’s really a very nice neighborhood now.

We live in a lovely 1926 house modeled after the Sears Kit Homes. We call it the Craphouse.

When we bought the Craphouse, it was an unholy mess. That was a few years ago, and we finally moved in last fall.

It’s still quite a mess.

The second floor wiring isn’t hooked up, there are holes in every single interior wall, the floors are unfinished or trashed, the first floor kitchen cabinets don’t have doors, the massive yard is missing a back fence and is so overgrown it could’ve been transplanted directly from the rainforest, the plumbing is shockingly unreliable and in all honesty we’re praying for a warm winter in 2013/2014 since space heaters are all we have and we only even have those on the first floor, because again: no wiring on the second floor. Up there, it’s all extension cords and strict power rationing (so as to not trip any fuses).

We love the place.

It’s becoming more of a craphome, really.

My daughter, Awesome Daughter, is grown up and doesn’t live with us but I’m introducing her here because she visits kind of a lot sometimes. Her boyfriend, Pretty Cool Boyfriend, may drop by once in a while — and now you’ve met him, too.

At 7:25 p.m. on April 12th, 2013 we had two dogs: Senior Dog, a 13-year-old Labrador Retriever who had been dumped on our street twelve and a half years before; and Pitsenji, an eighteen-month-old Pit Bull/Basenji mix who was dumped on our street about ten months before.

At 7:26 p.m. on April 12th, 2013 we had three dogs, all of them rescues.

That third dog hated us from the moment we brought him into the house. We didn’t care, because we weren’t going to keep him anyway.

This is the story of how we fell in love with Hate You Forever, and how he learned to hate us a little bit less every day*.